


Scars

by noifsandsorbees



Series: Scars [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Break Up, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 06:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4908655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noifsandsorbees/pseuds/noifsandsorbees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After leaving Mulder, Scully struggles to open up to someone new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

“Let’s start with the physical,” he says, nuzzling his nose underneath the bottom of her shirt, lips pressing a warm kiss just to the right of her belly button.

She laughs, nervously. “You want to know how many people I’ve been with? Aren’t we a little old for that?”

He presses his lips again to her skin, drawing away slowly, voice suddenly solemn. “I was thinking we could talk about your scars.”

She wants to play along, to give him answers and share a little bit of the weight her heart carries, the weight he has offered again and again to shoulder as much as she’ll let him and of which she has handed over none. She can feel him getting ready to give up on her and her bottomless self reliance, so she decides to try.

“Where do you want to start?”

His mouth moves up to the small circle on her stomach and he kisses it gently. “I think I can guess what this one is, but can you fill me in?”

“I was shot,” she pauses, unsure of how to continue, knowing he already knows that much. She looks down at him, can almost feel the innocence radiating from his eyes, and at once she knows that this is why she almost loves him, and why she never could. He’s a little bit younger than her, disarmingly handsome with warm brown eyes and an easy smile; two shiny doctorates hang over his office at Georgetown for his students to gawk at, but she thinks he knows nothing about the world.

“It was a murder case. In New York. Another agent shot the suspect and it hit me as well. I’m still not sure how I survived.”

She’s amazed at her ability to simplify and obfuscate. To not think about Alfred Fellig and immortality and to question whether such a thing is possible. She runs a hand through his soft hair and relaxes; this may be easier than she thought.

He moves down now, to her right knee, just below her skirt and a little to the side, and places another lingering kiss. For a moment she forgets what they’re doing and focuses on the calming warmth of his breath, convinced that if she concentrates hard enough this pause can last forever.

“I was six. My dad was stationed near Chicago, so my sister was teaching me to ice skate.” She decides to indulge him, hoping it will distract him from asking about the real scars. Besides, talking about Melissa always makes her smile; at least a little. “It was our first time living somewhere cold and I thought it would be my only chance to learn. I was so convinced I could go as fast as Missy. But, of course, I fell and knocked her over, and I landed right on her skate. The cut went straight through to my knee — had to get four stitches.”

She focuses on Melissa, aged 24, rediscovering the scar and laughing over it in their parents’ kitchen. Her eyes lighting up and her smile impossibly wide. Scully pushes back memories of Mulder’s lips there, his eyes glazing over with sorrow and guilt as she tells him the story.

But Graham just looks up at her with a dopey smile, the kind one should get when hearing childhood stories. She wonders how long she can wait before she tells him what happened to her; how she can craft that story to be even half as dark.

“See, this isn’t so bad.” He smirks as he pushes himself back up, placing a soft kiss on her lips. She’s still not sure but she kisses him back.

He goes back down to her stomach, to her fading stretch marks. He looks up at her and she rolls her eyes. He can’t read her well enough to know it’s an act, to see the worlds of pain brought by that reminder. Her eyes are always so unfathomably sad that he can never tell when it gets worse.

“I told you,” she laughs, forced. “I’d gained some weight after I left the FBI and then lost it.” It’s a pathetic story, even she knows that. He must know what they are, but she’s nearly convinced that she can spend a lifetime with him without ever mentioning the name William, without ever having to share that pain with someone who could never fully understand, and she clings to that hope.

She knows it’s a pathetic trick, to think she can keep everything from him. Not just the aliens and the government conspiracies, but her son and her sister and the man whose heartbeat is intricately, unwaveringly connected to her own. She knows she could spend the rest of her life with Graham, but that on her deathbed she’ll ask for Mulder, and Graham won’t even know who she is referring to.

At once she feels pure relief, as if she actually has a chance at a brand new life without any of the internal scars the world has inflicted on her; without having to think about the government’s hit list composed of anything that resembled her happiness. At once pure relief and an overwhelming buildup of bile in her throat, the real understanding that she’s picturing a future where she never sees Mulder again. Never hears his voice, lays in his arms, kisses his lips, his cheek, his forehead, his own scar from her bullet wound.

She shudders, and she knows Graham feels it, so he works his way back up and turns her onto her stomach, moving on when he senses her closing up. She complies, terrified of his next move.

He pushes her shirt up further, so it locks around her shoulders, and traces a jagged line in her back with tender fingers, brushing her long red locks to the side. She wonders how long he’s been planning this; how many silent questions he’s built up.

“This one is pretty weird. Sure you want to know?”

“I can take it.”

“I was looking into a murder in Utah and ended up trapped with this cult,” she pauses, realizing that no matter what she says next it won’t sound sane.

He knows she held a badge and a gun for close to a decade. He knows she chased murderers and kidnappers and performed more autopsies than she can count. But she doesn’t talk about those days, as if they’re too far in the past for her to remember. When he pushes, she shuts him down, says that it’s not her life anymore.

He’s never heard of the x files. He’s never heard the names Skinner or Doggett or Reyes. He’s never understood why the sight of oil can make her skin crawl and why sometimes she stares up into the sky as if she’s looking for something. Or someone. He’s never heard the name Mulder, only a trapped first syllable followed by the biting of her tongue and a change of topic.

She wets her lips and continues. “These people worshipped this slug, parasite...thing. And they thought it needed a host, so they would put it inside of a victim, which it would then kill. My partner got there just in time to cut it out of me. The real miracle is that I didn’t get tetanus.”

He thinks she’s opening up by telling these stories and adding humor (the real joke, she thinks, is how basic this story is compared to everything else she’s seen), so she’s not surprised by his next question.

“Tell me about your partner.”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “I was working with John Doggett then. Former Marine and NYPD, probably could have been the next director of the bureau.”

He pauses at her wording. “Did he…?” He trails off and she almost laughs because she can hardly remember a time before she knew what it was like to be surrounded by death. To be uncomfortable speaking about it out loud.

But then she suddenly remembers a gut-wrenching morning in Mulder’s car on the side of I-29. She was trying to talk while they drove to an assignment in Kentucky, terrified and trying to rationalize the way she was picturing her life leaving her body in waves during each chemo treatment, as if she could see it in the air, purple and blue and silver. _That much radiation and energy moving in one direction could theoretically create a physical force. Right Mulder, that makes sense?_

 _You’re the scientist, Scully,_ he had reassured her, working a sunflower seed between his front teeth. He grabbed the shell and tossed it out the window and she felt that word on repeat in her mind, out. out. out. It didn’t matter if she could see it or not, in that moment she understood that her life was flowing from the inside of her, out. He pulled over as she collapsed in sobs and hugged her until she nearly passed out from exhaustion, her head to his chest, his heartbeat working its way in, keeping her own going with a force so strong and undeniably present that she could forget about science for a moment.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever tell Graham about the cancer either. She adds that to her mental list and starts to question what’s left.

“No. He’s alive. Back up in New York. We still talk every once in awhile.” It’s a good enough answer, she thinks. He must think so too, or he’s learned that she’s impermeable when she wants to be.

He brings his right hand down to her lower back and runs his fingers in circles around her snake. It tickles and she treats him to a genuine laugh. “Does this count as a scar?” He asks with one raised eyebrow and a smirk.

“It actually is from a case, so it counts. That red ink there, the one that somehow hasn’t faded at all, has hallucinogenic properties. The other guy who got one with it ended up thinking his tattoo was telling him to kill.” She tells it like a joke, like the story is as ridiculous as it seems; like it doesn’t make her feel pathetic and wonder if she’ll always be subconsciously crying out for Mulder’s attention.

“Did it affect you?”

“Not that much. I was lucky.”

“But you decided to keep it?”

“I actually really love it,” she admits, and knows it’s true. She loves the rebellion, clings to it when overwhelmed with all the other emotions from that day. “As long as it’s not giving me commands, we’re good.”

Graham lets her shirt drop and moves his hands to softly rub her shoulders. She sighs into his pillow, hoping this means they’re done.

In moments like this, things are so good with him. She almost understands why she’s here and not back in her home with Mulder. It is still her home — the key is still on her ring, the address still on her license. She imagines the darkness as a physical entity, still surrounding his office, their bedroom, their lives.

Some days when she’s off from the hospital, Graham makes her breakfast and kisses her until she can’t think straight. They walk from his Dupont Circle apartment to the Mall and wander hand in hand around the monuments and through the Smithsonian. They share coffee and ice cream and diet cokes in bars with live music. He makes love to her and she falls asleep without once thinking of Mulder or William or aliens or darkness. She is genuinely happy then.

“One more,” he whispers, his hands still working the knots out of her shoulders. He pauses long enough to drop a gentle kiss on the back of her neck.

She swallows. Hard. Having almost forgotten this one somehow.

Some days when she’s with him she finds peace, but others she fakes half smiles while her mind is a constant loop of images: William’s hand curling around her finger, Emily’s around her cross, Mulder’s around her own, his lips soft and warm and protective on her forehead.

She doesn’t know how to tell Graham anything about this scar without having to tell him at least one thing on her never-speak list, and then one thing will lead to more. From abductions to cancer to stolen ova to lost children to a heartbroken lover living not even two hours away. She can’t quite bring herself to throw an ex on there even though it’s been three weeks and two days since she last broke down and let herself into Mulder’s bed.

She runs through a list of lies in her head, none of which taste convincing.

“Dana?” He urges, concern plaguing his voice.

She sits up, her hand awkwardly jerking up to rub at her chip.

“I’m going to go for a run.” She’s changed and out the door before he can figure out what made her tick.

Most mornings she wakes up alone in her apartment, only a block away from her old one in Georgetown, and heads straight to work. But when she wakes up at Graham’s, it’s usually with a sense of discomfort. He pulls her to his chest and she curls into his warmth, but she knows it’s wrong — that his smell is too sweet and he’s too short, even though he towers over her, and he’s far too innocent to ever understand all she’s seen. On the rare days where she can push these thoughts aside, she’ll catch his lips and kiss him until noon, but most of the time she finds her shoes and runs miles and miles, several times finding herself in Alexandria, unsure how she got there but drawn to the remnants of Mulder’s presence.

Graham never wakes up at her apartment. He’s never been in her bed, or really past her door frame. She can’t bring herself to put away the few pictures of her son on her bookcase, the one of Mulder and her that she can’t bear to look at, and, the one that kills her most of all, of a day-old William in his father’s arms.

Graham will never know he’s spent the last six months dating a former fugitive. He’ll never know he’s dating an abductee. A mother. A killer. He’ll never know what it’s like to run from the law, to trust no one, to lose a child, or two, to fire a gun at point-blank range with trembling hands, to believe in everything and nothing despite reason and logic and science.

She finds herself arriving in Old Town Alexandria a few hours before sunset, barely feeling the nearly 10 miles she just put behind her. She buys herself a coffee and drinks it standing over the Potomac. She remembers the salty taste of the Pacific on Mulder from their one semi-real vacation together. With the bureau credit card tucked away in her purse, they drove along the coast in a rented convertible to an empty beach where he made love to her against the leg of a pier and then playfully pushed her to the ocean floor. She dragged him down with her, still in their formal wear, and kissed him madly, tasting champagne and sea water on the inside of his cheek.

She gets back to the city right before dinner, high on endorphins and memories so ridiculously happy that she regularly questions whether they could really belong to her. Graham knows her smile is rare and he kisses her as if he genuinely thinks it’s because of him. She indulges him because for all her reservations about sharing her past life with him, she enjoys sharing her present one.

She tries to figure out how long this will last. How many more months she can lead him on and bask in the excitement and warmth that is new love before she goes home, where she unquestioningly knows Mulder will take her back. His hand cradles her neck, drawing her closer, with a stray finger ghosting over her chip.

She knows she’ll leave soon.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in more than a decade, so bear with me. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that clearly Mulder and Scully belong together, but even if you (ridiculously) took that element out, how could they ever really be with someone else after all they’ve been through? This is what came of that. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.


End file.
